Save money, time, and headaches while building a team that is stronger and more productive.
Hi! 👋 Our name is our mission: Optimize.
We help Democratic campaigns, PACs, and other progressive organizations win more elections by maximizing their money, time, and talent through a comprehensive suite of people, financial, and operations services.
💸 Save money
Our approach to HR provides a critical intermediary step between doing it yourself and getting your lawyers involved. We do the initial work to get your lawyers the information they need to give advice. Then we execute based on your decisions, so you don’t have to pay an attorney’s hourly rate for work that doesn’t require a lawyer.
We have decades of experience people management, financial systems, and political operations. We help our clients find the most cost-effective solutions to their operational needs, from health insurance plans to print vendors and everything in-between.
We will also create a custom budget template for your needs and keep it updated with actuals. We will track your cash-on-hand and project your cash flow into the future.
⏱️ Save time
We save our clients thousands of hours every year by cutting red tape and taking on the necessary tasks that are time-intensive for any individual organization to handle but that we’ve gotten great at. We work with tax and employment agencies, health insurance and payroll vendors, and more so you can spend your valuable time focusing on your job.
We do operations work because every minute we save our clients is a minute they can use to win an election, pass a piece of legislation, or better advocate for progressive values.
🤯 Save headaches
A little proactive HR and operations work can save you from future headaches and stressful situations. We love to work with organizations that allow us to solve problems before they come up, by providing your employees with a strong foundation from Day 1. We work directly with your employees through our HR help desk.
We want them to bring up concerns so we can either solve problems or correct expectations right away. Otherwise, those issues tend to fester and then blow up when times are stressful, typically right around Election Day.
We created sexual harassment and implicit bias training modules specifically for political professionals. Check it out!
Schedule a meeting with us!
Who We Are
Our leadership team has extensive experience in politics, non-profits, and the private sector, optimizing organizations to do more.
Joey Pacific | Co-Founder and Managing Partner
Joey is a leading political operations professional with over a decade of experience at all levels of operations for campaigns, state party committees, PACs, and non-profit organizations. Joey was a Senior Advisor at Harris for President and was the Chief Operating Officer on Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 campaign for president. He has experience managing multi-million dollar budgets and has led and advised on operations for organizations with teams of thousands of people.
Pete Kavanaugh | Co-Founder and Partner
Pete has worked at the highest levels of Democratic politics, having served as Deputy Campaign Manager for Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. Pete has also served in a variety of leadership roles on the state and national levels, including senior positions on four Democratic presidential campaigns, has advised dozens of leading issue advocacy groups, companies, and coalitions, and has started multiple successful businesses.
Samantha Kawabata | CEO
Samantha brings over fifteen years of experience working in operations for non-profits, political organizations, and private-sector businesses. She was the Chief Operating Officer for a design and development firm, the National Director of Operations for Pete for America in 2020, and has worked in various roles at other organizations. She started working at Optimize in 2023.
Some of the groups that have trusted Optimize with their operations:
Our Other Project
The work we do at Optimize is a core part of our mission to improve the Democratic ecosystem. We recently announced another part of that mission - a software platform called Operative that reimagines how campaigns and PACs manage and report their financial information. Find out more here.